While I agree, it is probably a case of not being in their target market:

- Average age: 40+

- Average household income: 250k+

- Average household net worth: 1.5m+

From http://www.wsjmediakit.com/files/uploads/201410/2016_WSJcom_....

Here is a working link that contains all the the info parent cites:

http://www.wsjmediakit.com/files/uploads/201410/WSJ.com%20Au...

Also, this is the _actual_ audience not their _target_ audience.

How do you know it's not also the target audience?

I wager their print edition subscriber base is considerably wealthier.

link doesn't work

https://blendle.com/ seems to meet your needs.

I really enjoyed Blendle for a while, but I found that I frequently ended up paying for articles on the Blendle platform that I could have accessed for free from the publisher.

This is exactly how I want to support journalism & consume news. I don't want to commit to a single source of news, but I'm happy to pay per use.

But this is another layer of intermediation without value add - these people are basically journalist taxing, and isn't this another place where smart folks are effectively deciding what other people want to read?

If there's no value add, then why are people using this service? It's not like it has exclusive access to all those articles.

Thanks for the link! I just signed up requesting a beta invite. $0.25 per article, with an instant refund sounds fair. I have wanted access to The Economist, etc., but not enough for a full subscription.

The Economist is the only news organ I have consistently found to be worth subscribing to, despite its faults. The stuff in it that you think you're not interested in is almost invariably worth knowing about.

I had a subscription to the Economist for years and was reader for much longer, but the content has gotten much worse and they insist on displaying video ads right in the middle of articles even if you pay for a subscription.

I have Economist subscription and U Block, never seen any video ads.

Why do you think the content has gotten worse?

I feel the content has become less evidence based, less thorough, less anlytic, less principled and less hard hitting than it used to be. There's more purely anecdotal/cultural stuff that I can get anywhere.

They used to ask important questions, investigate them thoroughly and then make the case for a particular conclusion. You could agree or disagree, but now it's often just an exercise in careful fence sitting, in "being sensible", even on matters where taking a principled stand is the obvious thing to do.

That said, I'm not entirely certain if it's me who has changed or The Economist or both.

You should see if your local library gives you access to Zinio - I get the Economist (and numerous other publications) for free through ours.

Good tip, but when I was subscribing to the Economist, I found it worth using their app, which was much better, although, not free.

IMHO the Economist has the best iPad app for reading longer news/analysis content I have come across. The simplicity of the navigation and the non-nonsens approach to article viewing is just very good. I don't get why others can't do the same.

I would consider perhaps $5-$10 a month if the WSJ was going to be my only source of news. If I could trust it to provide me with all I need every morning while I eat my breakfast.

Unfortunately I live in Australia so most stuff in WSJ I don't care about. (And we have the ABC)

The Washington Post, one of the three best papers in America (NYT, WSJ, Post), is $50/year if you're a prime subscriber.

I'm only seeing a $144/year option?

On my phone but try this https://www.washingtonpost.com/pr/wp/2015/09/16/amazon-prime...

Why is a full feed of quality news worth less to you than Netflix?

Netflix provides many times more hours of entertainment than the WSJ could ever hope to.

If you consider news only an entertainment product, that's a fair comparison. If you want to know what's going on in the world, it's not.

Netflix costs too much for what it is. News that you can find anywhere else is certainly not worth much. Yes, depending upon how you wish it to be documented and such, it may be worth it but I don't understand the want to see any more news than the local news and what Google can provide. I'm not against supporting; I just wonder why anyone would spend more than an hour a day reading news from one source.

"quality news" is rarely consistent or reliable.

wsj in particular had some rather absurd hit pieces on bernie sanders.

Netflix is $9 a month here in Australia.

Nobody pays for Netflix; they just use their cousin's/sister's/girlfriend's/etc.'s account.

Not sure if this is a good deal, but take a look: https://myaccount.news.com.au/theaustralian/subscribe?pkgDef...

$16 a month for The Australian and the WSJ for 3 months, then $32 a month. That is a bit steep given we all already pay for http://www.abc.net.au/news/

The amount you want to pay for news is not anywhere close to the value it is providing you or that they make from ad revenue.

Let's say you're standing in a field strewn with gold bars. A man comes up to you and offers to sell you a gold bar for $400,000. You point out that you are standing among hundreds of gold bars, all of them free for the taking. He points out that it was a lot of hard work extracting gold from thousands of tons of ore, casting it, assaying it, etc.

Just because something cost a lot to make, doesn't mean it's worth a lot. Sorry.

To be fair, we do not exactly have an oversupply of WSJ caliber journalism.

To also be fair, WSJ is hardly high caliber journalism, and since the sale to Murdoch has degraded significantly in quality

And therin lies the situation. WSJ is worth very little to the very many. I see it as just another editorialized website. Was it always that way? No. Paper editions of the wall street journal were very good, on occasion. Web editions in the new age of journalism, not even close. No where near worth even trying to go around their paywall.

The beginning of the end for me with the WSJ was when they changed the printed size.

I would disagree. Their opinion pages have become more conservative, but their business news and investigative reporting is just as good as it always has been.

I agree. However I do always wonder why conservative views are devalued. I am a paid NY Times digital subscriber and I think the price is robbery however despite being conservative, I do find value in the other viewpoints. It seems like many equate conservative viewpoints as 'not worth supporting.' In my opinion, it's worth it for me to read the other side because I don't necessarily need an echo chamber reinforcing my own bias. Perhaps ironically, I subscribe to The NY Times and not the WSJ.

But I don't live in a world surrounded by gold bars. I live in a world where news comes from Buzzfeed and CNN and Fox News and less scrupulous "news" organizations who are only looking towards the next eyeball. I am surrounded by bars of iron. Your parable simply doesn't match the world I live in.

Consider BBC, Al Jazeera, MIT News, and many many others. I won't say those are all gold, but they aren't lead.

Ah, yes, this is also why the US has no sweat of the brow doctrine, with the prime example being "trying to copyright a phone book".

That's not the problem. I might be willing pay a lot for news. What I don't want is 100 different newspaper subscriptions. And to say that you should just pick a favorite newspaper and get everything from there is like demanding you decide what books you want before visiting a library.

That's exactly the problem with the person I replied to. Maybe there's a micropayment solution that someone will crack the nut on after decades of people talking about it. But that solution is definitely not 5¢ an article for WSJ quality news.

Blendle is a decent attempt at per article payment for journalism.

I tried it for a few months and was happy, but found out I don't have time to read articles in full anyway. I'm sure it will work for someone else though.

My personal opinion is that news orgs should operate as non-profits, since profit motive drives them to editorialize and publish things to get money vs publishing things to inform people about what's going on. I want reporting, I want facts, I don't want entertainment.

You think non-profit "news" sources don't editorialize? Democracy Now doesn't editorialize? State run media doesn't editorialize?

Perhaps that's true for the top 10% most engaged WSJ users.

But, how do you know how much value I'm getting from that news source? I usually get my news from many different sources. And sometimes, I don't even read the entire article. Only a small percentage of the articles are actually of interest to me.

> The amount you want to pay for news is not anywhere close to the value it is providing you or that they make from ad revenue.

What amount would be close to the value they make from ad revenue?

I would speculate they make between $5 - $20 CPM and they show 3-5 ads per article view. That puts the revenue between 1.5¢ and 10¢ per article pageview.

Micropayment approaches and payment processor rates vary, but I'd generalize to probably 30% take rate. So assume 3.5¢ to 7¢ payment per article. Do you pay for every article you load? Do you pay again if you load the article twice? What if you don't like the article and don't want to pay? I don't think it's quite as simple as 3.5¢ to 7¢ because no one has really proven this model to work yet.

> What if you don't like the article and don't want to pay?

YOu read the first free paragraph, if you like that you pay, if you dont like the rest of the article you dont get a refund since you have already consumed the article.

A $20 CPM? I'm thinking it's nowhere close. That's exceeding TV level CPMs.

The WSJ is very valuable for enterprise advertising. TV is going to hit a much broader segment of audience, which will include many people who won't care about EnterProse Corp's new widget for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance.

I posted this somewhere else on this thread, but I've seen a lot of the "I just want to pay 25c per article" comments. Try https://blendle.com

I'd be happy to buy an issue at a time - I think $.5 would be a fair price given that there is no printing cost and that the advertising is more valuable as it's micro targeted to me. I'd buy an issue to read a particular article or because I want one to read for general amusement.

Subscription feels like monogamy, I've got lots of different things to spend cash on, I don't want to commit at this scale to spending it on things I may not want.

So 15 minutes of entertainment time to you (the time spent consuming a WSJ article) is worth 5 or 10 cents? Imagine if you were compensated at the same rate for your work.

I suggest you try to find a substitute for those entertainment pennies. If you can, and that item is "free", good for you. But I doubt 5 or 10 cents gets you much.

A Netflix subscription is around 30 cents per day.

Not to mention that 15 minutes is a very generous estimate, the median is probably closer to 3-5 minutes. Given that the article isn't written for me, that sounds rather fair for accessing it. A print subscription to the WSJ is $400/yr or $1.30/issue, and if I spend an hour reading it that comes out to 6 to 11 cents for a 3-to-5-minute article.

That's probably more expensive per article then the print product, which included costs of physical production.

Journalism has always been about advertisers and scale. The problem now is lowered barriers to entry drove up supply, reducing advertising $ available to "real journalism" and entities like nyt and wsj still have vestigial anchors pulling them down further.

Couple that with growing adblocking and it's a bad recipe. How do you put that genie back in the bottle? The net effect has been lowered standards by former standouts in a race to the bottom. I don't see a fix, much less an easy one.

If my work could be simultaneously consumed by millions of people and they all wanted to pay 5 or 10 cents, I'd be totally ok with that.

I speed read. Usually I'm done in less than 30-60 seconds. There's so much filler stuff in there, often.

I totally agree with you, it would also make me read the article worth the money spent. As a company they must pay salaries of established staff, that sort of stands at odds with per article revenue. Its like this, if business hires people for at least 6months they ought to make an effort to get those people paid and projecting income from penny articles can be substantially difficult.

They need to go iTunes way and unbundle payments for individual articles. The past has shown that people will pay for quality contents. Also they need to make the payment UI super efficient. If I have to take out my credit card every time then forget it.

If you're a student, WSJ has a plan for $50/yr.

Always worth checking the school library database first as it might be available for free (well, 'free'... not including tuition..)

I hadn't considered that, but you're right. I was able to find fresh WSJ and Economist for "free" on ProQuest. I still prefer the format of the WSJ site/app, but this could work just as well.